30 August 25
Workers hang a large photo of US President Donald Trump on the facade of the Department of Labour headquarters building in Washington, DC, on August 27, 2025. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty)
Mortgage fraud is bad, but digging up dirt to target political opponents is worse.
Too many, I think, to make felons of them all.
The question arises as the Trump administration threatens charges against three prominent Democrats who have angered the president: U.S. Senator Adam Schiff of California, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. All stand accused of submitting an application for a home loan stating that the property would be their primary residence, then treating another property as their primary residence. (Schiff and James have denied wrongdoing. Cook is suing Donald Trump for attempting to fire her, a move her lawyer has said “lacks any factual or legal basis.”)
The alleged offense might sound minor, but it’s a felony that can yield multiple years in prison. In an editorial, The Wall Street Journal argued that Bill Pulte, the Trump appointee who referred all three cases to the Department of Justice, seems preoccupied with using his power as a housing regulator against Trump’s opponents. The Journal called the administration’s actions “an ominous turn in political lawfare.”
Pulte denies that he is fishing for wrongdoers. “If you commit mortgage fraud in America,” he wrote on X on Monday, “we will come after you, no matter who you are.” But so long as his actions and statements are focused on prominent enemies of Trump, no fair observer can trust his word. If the administration prosecutes these cases, it will cause many Americans to deem its actions illegitimate. And Democrats, whenever they return to power, could succumb to the temptation to prosecute Republicans for mortgage fraud, continuing a dysfunctional cycle of revenge.
No one should want federal bureaucrats poring over loan documents and consistently prosecuting all falsehoods. There are, of course, some mortgage-fraud cases in which perpetrators knowingly commit a serious transgression, and the cost to lenders can be high. In a 2023 research paper, Ronel Elul of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that some real-estate investors use occupancy fraud—misrepresenting themselves as owner-occupants—to obtain lower mortgage rates than they otherwise could get, and that they default at a higher rate than other investors. Such fraud “is broad-based,” Elul and two co-authors write: They find that these fraudulent borrowers make up one-third of the population of investors seeking mortgages. Few fraudulent borrowers are charged. In fiscal year 2024, the federal government filed fewer than 20 total cases of mortgage fraud, according to the U.S. Attorneys’ annual statistical report.
Prosecuting the kind of fraud that Elul documented, however, is far different from making a felon of, say, a low-risk borrower who puts incorrect information on a form when purchasing a vacation house. Loan paperwork is confusing. Confronted with hundreds of pages and dozens of places to sign and initial, many borrowers simply trust a loan officer or adviser when they say something like, You always check this box. It’s fine.
Regularly prosecuting cases like the ones the Trump administration is grandstanding about would enmesh many unwitting wrongdoers in legal nightmares, just as the civil-libertarian attorney Harvey Silverglate warned in his 2009 book, Three Felonies a Day. In it, he distinguishes between common-law crimes such as theft, assault, and murder, which all perpetrators know to be serious transgressions, and the many federal laws that make felons out of people who don’t even realize that they are doing something wrong. “Trump’s pursuit of these mortgage fraud cases is precisely what I warned about,” Silverglate wrote to me when I reached him by email earlier this week. “This system paves the way to tyranny—a system in which, alas, I fear we find ourselves.”
Of course, there is no way that the Trump administration would agree to review the home loans of its own political appointees and fire, let alone prosecute, anyone who claimed more than one primary residence. There is no way Republicans in Congress would agree to a third-party review of their home-loan applications. The Associated Press, citing a review of public documents, reported in July that two Republican officials, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his wife, Angela, a state senator in Texas, had signed mortgages that “contained inaccurate statements declaring that each of those three houses was their primary residence, enabling the now-estranged couple to improperly lock in low interest rates.” (Neither Ken nor Angela Paxton responded to the AP’s requests for comment.) Trump officials are treating their political enemies in a way that they’d never treat political allies, a far more serious and corrosive betrayal of the rule of law than what they are alleging that Schiff, James, and Cook have done.
And Trump himself is guilty of an especially flagrant double standard. When he said he was firing Cook—who is among the Federal Reserve governors who has voted to keep interest rates steady, against Trump’s wishes—he sent her a letter that cited the mortgage-fraud allegations and stated that Americans “must be able to have full confidence in the honesty of the members entrusted with setting policy and overseeing the Federal Reserve.” But Trump, who oversees the whole executive branch, was found liable last year for greatly inflating his assets to get better rates on bank loans. “A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud,” the judge in the case wrote. Trump appealed; a higher court reversed the financial penalty the judge had imposed, but the ruling so far stands.
Targeting political enemies for prosecution is corrosive. Asking Americans to believe that you find their alleged behavior disqualifying when you were found guilty of similar behavior on a much bigger scale insults the intelligence of the public. The inevitable effect is to amplify outrage and inspire others to seek revenge.
As the Wall Street Journal editorial board notes, “Misstating information on mortgage applications doesn’t appear to be uncommon.” Perhaps that’s cause for reform of some sort—or maybe banks often don’t care about the “primary residence” distinction for good reason, such as if they can determine that the buyer in question is low-risk. But there is every reason to surmise that, given enough time to dig through loan applications, the Trump administration––or the Newsom or Ocasio-Cortez administration––could selectively prosecute enough people to intimidate the opposition, or hold the prospect of felony prosecutions over political opponents to silence them.
Détente is the only sane course. But we have as president a 79-year-old lame duck who won’t have to deal with the long-term consequences of his actions, so insanity may prevail.
Mother of Disabled 15 Year-old Boy, Held at Gunpoint by US Immigration Agents Files $1 Million Claim
An ICE agent monitors hundreds of asylum seekers being processed upon entering the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building. (photo: David Dee Delgado/Getty)
Trump officials accused of false imprisonment and ‘unconstitutional racial profiling’ over incident in LA
The teenager, a US citizen with disabilities, was in a vehicle with his mother outside Arleta high school in Los Angeles on 11 August when masked immigration agents surrounded them and pulled them from the vehicle. They said the boy was a suspect in a crime, and handcuffed him for several minutes until they realized they had the wrong person, the Los Angeles Times reported.
His mother told NBC4 that the agent told her son they had confused him with someone else, but to “look at the bright side: you’re gonna have an exciting story to tell your friends when you go back to school”.
“What’s exciting about getting guns pointed at you?” she said.
The claim, filed by the Carrillo law firm on behalf of the boy and his mother, alleges that Ice and Border Patrol agents had no reasonable suspicion or probable cause to detain the boy and caused him physical injury and emotional distress. He is traumatized and depressed, his mother said to media.
The agents “racially profiled [the teen] while he was merely sitting his car waiting for his family member”, the claim states. It also alleges the agents left live bullet rounds on the scene in an act of “clear negligence”.
The incident drew widespread outrage across Los Angeles, and fueled fears around the activities of immigration agents, particularly around city schools. Days earlier, authorities arrested an 18-year-old as he was walking his dog, shortly before he was set to start his senior year of high school.
The Los Angeles Unified school district has moved to adopt new strategies to protect students and “ensure that schools remain safe, supportive spaces for all children and families – regardless of immigration status”.
Alberto M Carvalho, the LAUSD superintendent, has said the incident involving the 15-year-old was “unacceptable”. Immigration enforcement around schools “disrupts learning and creates anxiety that can last far beyond the school day”, Carvalho said in a statement earlier this month.
In response to the 15-year-old’s detainment, Luz Rivas, a congressperson, condemned the administration’s “continued use of violent tactics to terrorize our students and families”.
The claim was filed against the US Department of Homeland Security, US Customs and Border Protection, US Customs and Border Protection and United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The Department of Homeland Security said allegations that agents targeted the high school were false and that agents were conducting a “targeted operation on [a] criminal illegal alien”.
“What makes someone a target for immigration enforcement is if they are illegally in the US – NOT their skin color, race, or ethnicity. America’s brave men and women are removing murderers, MS-13 gang members, pedophiles, rapists–truly the worst of the worst from Golden State communities,” the statement said.
The agency accused the law firm of trying to use“racial animus to collect clicks, clout, and cash”.
The Trump Administration Reportedly Sought to ‘Soft Launch’ a New Election-Watching Tool
Trump administration quietly sought to “soft launch” modified features of a high-tech tool it’s using to gather election data that many people fear could be weaponized. (photo: AP)
The email, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC, was reportedly sent last week by a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services official to a lawyer for the North Carolina State Board of Elections, inviting North Carolina to test “exciting new features” of a federal database that the Trump administration has retrofitted to try to support its thoroughly debunked claims that Democrats have relied on illegal votes from noncitizens to sway elections.
The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database is known as SAVE. Basically, it’s a federal database previously used for tracking entitlement benefits that has been perverted into an election-monitoring tool. SAVE combines federal immigration and crime data, along with data on state voter rolls and personal information like Social Security numbers, to target people deemed ineligible to vote, including alleged noncitizens.
As Democracy Docket noted, the new upgrade “allows election officials to use just the last four digits of a social security number — rather than requiring all nine — along with the individual’s name and date of birth when submitting a citizenship check request.”
And according to The News … Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, the state’s GOP-controlled elections board is considering handing data over to the federal government to be fed into the tool:
The board is “doing due diligence to ensure that if we provide the voter rolls to the federal government that that information is safeguarded, protected and only used and seen by the people that are working on that project,” spokesperson Pat Gannon said.
Also, according to the Brennan Center, the Trump administration has issued demands for voter information from nearly two dozen other states.
Considering the administration’s false claims about crime and immigration, the reports of American citizens being ensnared in President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant crackdowns, the administration’s interests in rapidly denaturalizing some citizens, and the tendency for voter roll purges to disenfranchise nonwhite voters, there’s reason to worry that a tool like SAVE — which could be riddled with errors — will be used to promote Trump’s false claims about election fraud or to limit Americans’ voter eligibility.
Those concerns are laid out by numerous experts in this CyberScoop report from June, which quotes a spokesperson for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services as saying the database will be used to “help identify and stop aliens from hijacking our elections” — essentially parroting Trump.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to MSNBC’s request for comment. It’s unclear whether similar emails have been sent to election officials in other states.
And it’s certainly worth noting here that any data retrieved from states using this tool would fall under the purview of Heather Honey, the pro-Trump election denier who distorted voter data in a dubious effort to try to help overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss — and was recently appointed to oversee “election integrity” at DHS.
Immigrant Victims of Domestic Violence Scared to Seek Help Amid ICE Deportation Threat
Federal agents patrol the halls of immigration court at the Jacob K. Javitz Federal Building in New York City on July 23. (photo: Michael Nigro/AP)
In a separate case from April, a Salvadoran woman in Houston called 911 to report being a victim of domestic violence. Legal records reviewed by the Houston Chronicle indicate that police then called ICE.
The women’s stories are not unique, activists and experts tell Noticias Telemundo, explaining that in some cases abusers use immigration status to control or abuse their victims — who come from all socioeconomic backgrounds. Experts say victims are more fearful now amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and recent immigration raids.
Isaret Jeffers, founder of the Tree Collective, which supports farmworkers in the Tampa, Florida, area, said several undocumented women farmworkers have told her they’re enduring abuse from their partners for fear that reporting them will lead to their deportation.
Isabel Martínez, manager of the social services program at the Tahirih Justice Center, focused on helping victims of gender-based violence, said women fear that “not only will nothing happen to the abuser, but now I will have to be deported, or be detained, or get into trouble if I call the police.”
Since January, Martínez said, women have told her organization that they’d decided they couldn’t call the police and were too afraid to call the group because they feared it would have to call the police and report the abuse.
“Since the deportations began and they’re targeting people more severely, that’s where we’ve seen people become more afraid,” Martínez said. “They’re thinking twice about reporting.”
Though women represent 84% of victims of spousal abuse and 86% of victims of intimate partner abuse, according to the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Statistics, anyone can be a victim of abuse, regardless of gender, age, sexual orientation or national origin.
Fear of reporting — and deadly consequences
Immigrant victims’ fear of reporting crimes against them is not new. As early as 2019, the Tahirih Justice Center said its social workers had observed that women often refused to report gender-based violence for fear of deportation.
In a national survey released by the Alliance for Immigrant Survivors this June, 76% of immigrant advocates reported that victims of domestic violence were afraid to call the police for fear of ICE. It also found that half of immigration advocates had worked with immigrants who had dropped their criminal or civil cases for fear of deportation.
A similar study of two U.S. hospital emergency departments (one in San Francisco and one in Oakland, California) found almost 1 in 5 (19%) domestic violence victims avoided going to the police for fear that the police would report them to immigration authorities.
Francesco Duberli, CEO and founder of Survivors Pathway, a Miami-based center that offers counseling and legal help for survivors of domestic violence, sexual abuse and human trafficking, said that “what we’re seeing is an exaggerated, and also very sad, increase in the psychological aspect of being terrified of immigration authorities.”
ICE reopened the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) office, created during Trump’s first administration. Its main focus is to provide help to victims of crimes perpetrated by immigrants and to “acknowledge and serve the needs of victims and families who have been affected by crimes committed by individuals with a nexus to immigration violations,” according to its website.
Under one of the “frequently asked questions,” it states that it “provides releasable information to all victims of crime with a nexus to immigration, regardless of the immigration status of the victim.” Noticias Telemundo contacted ICE and the Department of Homeland Security about the office, but didn’t receive a response. VOICE said it did not have a spokesperson available and referred any questions to its website.
A failure to report domestic abuse can have fatal consequences: More than 50% of homicides committed by intimate partners were preceded by violence, and in cases where the victim is a woman, the figure rises to 75%, according to studies by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In Houston, an immigrant woman who is not being identified because she fears reprisals told Noticias Telemundo of a November 2024 incident in which she felt her life was in danger. She recalled clutching the steering wheel while driving as her partner was grabbing it and threatening to kill her. She said the man, who is her child’s father and had been drinking, poured a drink on her and then punched her in the stomach and later in the head, rendering her unconscious for a time.
She said she later drove to a friend’s house, called the police and reported the violence. The police arrested him, and upon his release from jail on that charge, he was detained by ICE and eventually deported. In November, following the violent episode, the woman, a Mexican immigrant, applied for a U visa for victims of crimes such as domestic violence, and is awaiting its approval.
Immigrant victims' challenges, risks
Certain factors make it hard for immigrant victims of domestic violence to leave or report their abusive situations, including being financially dependent on their abuser and having children who depend on them.
The Houston woman’s partner threatened to take away her son, and the stress affected both her and her baby. “That was the saddest part of this whole process,” the woman said. “He was a baby, he was a 1 1/2-year-old. If I didn’t eat, he didn’t want to eat either. He knew when I was sad. He knew when I was crying. And you say, ’How could such a little person know I’m sick?’”
Leaving a partner and filing a complaint with the court system “requires reflection and asking, ’What’s going to happen next? How do I pay the rent? How do I feed my children?’” said Duberli, of Survivors Pathway. If the children belong to the abuser, he can file for legal custody, which can cost thousands of dollars.
“It’s a conglomeration of socioeconomic and psychological factors, and when you put them all together, you realize they become an immense wall that prevents immigrants from seeking justice,” he said.
Low-income women have a higher incidence of domestic violence. Of the women who sought legal assistance after experiencing intimate partner violence, 85% lived at or below 200% of the federal poverty level, according to a 2024 study by the University of Cambridge.
Victims also fear that their partner will attack them further if they report it, or they feel ashamed and believe they’re to blame for their situation. A key factor, according to therapists, is victims’ self-esteem: As the Texas immigrant woman described it, “Feeling like you’re nobody” as psychological abuse escalates, with taunts like “What are you going to do without me?” and “How are you going to get ahead?” she said.
Some victims have suffered abuse in home countries where domestic violence is more normalized and they’re used to abusers having impunity, Duberli said.
Martínez, of the Tahirih Justice Center, said the first step to leaving an abusive relationship is to break the strong psychological control the perpetrator can have over the victim. “You don’t deserve abuse,” she said.
It’s also common for immigrant victims to lack a support network of family or friends in a country with a foreign culture and language.
Some immigrants face greater risk if they rely on an abusive spouse to obtain legal status, as the American Immigration Council (AIC) has stated on its website, since abusers can use immigration status as a “tool to silence their victims” and may delay, withdraw or fail to file petitions for their relatives or threaten to report them to authorities.
Emergency exits: The U visa and the VAWA petition
For victims of violent crimes such as domestic abuse who can demonstrate cooperation with authorities in the investigation or prosecution of the crime, there is the U visa. If approved, the applicant receives a work permit valid for four years, and after three years, they can apply for permanent residence (green card).
However, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services recently told Noticias Telemundo that “a good faith determination on a pending application for U nonimmigrant status does not protect a foreign national from immigration enforcement.”
Duberli said victims can also file a petition under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). Those who file a complaint, Duberli explains, can continue their immigration process without the abuser’s involvement or knowledge.
In the case of the Texas immigrant woman, she cooperated with authorities regarding the crime, a key step to getting her U visa status approved and regularized.
For now, the woman said, “I continue working on myself, on my self-esteem — I continue with everything. Moving forward.”
Venezuelan Migrants in Guantanamo Subjected to Isolation, Poor Hygiene and Stale Food, HRW Says
An Army captain walks outside unoccupied detainee cells inside Camp 6 at the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2016. (photo: Ben Fox/AP)
Human Rights Watch says it interviewed 20 Venezuelan migrants who were held at Guantanamo in February for 11 to 16 days. They were part of the group of 177 Venezuelans who were sent there and later flown to Honduras before being deported to Venezuela.
According to Human Rights Watch, the migrants said they suffered human rights violations even before being sent to Guantanamo.
Some said they were detained after crossing the southern US border solely based on their nationality and tattoos, which immigration authorities used to link them to the criminal gang Tren de Aragua.
The Donald Trump administration has designated Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization, but the Venezuelan government denies the migrants are members of the group, saying most have no criminal record and that those who do, have been brought to justice.
Human Rights Watch says other migrants reported being taken into custody immediately after attending appointments with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and not being told they would be transferred from US detention centers to Guantanamo Bay.
The US Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, rejected Human Rights Watch’s claims.
“Any claim that conditions are poor at ICE detention centers is false. All detainees are provided adequate food, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their families and attorneys. Ensuring the safety, security, and well-being of those in our custody is a top priority at ICE,” the department said in an email to CNN.
In January, days after starting his second term as president, Trump announced plans to send 30,000 undocumented migrants to Guantanamo. So far, only a few hundred have been sent there, including the group of 177 Venezuelans.
The number of migrants detained at the base temporarily dropped to zero in March, when the US Navy’s Southern Command said 40 had been transferred to another location. This came as civil rights organizations were challenging the policy in court.
When asked on Thursday if there are still migrants at Guantanamo, the Department of Homeland Security told CNN that there are, without specifying the number or nationalities, and said the possibility of sending more migrants remains open.
Confinement and suicide attempts
Once at Guantanamo, Venezuelan migrants were not informed about their legal status and were held in confinement under conditions they described as harsh and unsanitary, the Human Rights Watch report says.
Most of the migrants interviewed by the organization said they were placed in a high-security unit known as Camp 6, where each person was detained in two-by-three-meter cells, with a concrete bed and a sink-and-toilet combination. According to testimonies, guards gave them a sheet and a pillow, and only a few received a mattress.
In both Camp 6 and another detention facility, migrants reported unsanitary conditions, poor hygiene and deteriorating infrastructure. One said his cell was dirty and had a strong smell of sewage.
The migrants also reported that they were only allowed to bathe every three days, and though they were fed three times a day, the food was insufficient and of poor quality, including spoiled rice and beans.
“I was hungry all the time, and my stomach hurt,” one told Human Rights Watch. “I arrived there weighing 78 kilos and returned to Venezuela weighing 52.”
The migrants said they spent 23 hours a day in the cells and were only allowed out to a courtyard for the remaining hour, without being able to communicate with each other. Confinement coupled with not knowing what would happen to them seriously affected their mental health, they recounted. One said he was so desperate he attempted suicide twice.
“No immigrant or asylum seeker who leaves their country in search of protection should be taken to a place like this,” said Juanita Goebertus, Human Rights Watch’s Americas director.
Guantanamo in US immigration policy
This is not the first time testimonies have been made public about migrants’ conditions at Guantanamo Bay.
In March, José Daniel Simancas Rodríguez, one of the 177 Venezuelans held there in February, told CNN about his experience.
“That’s what torture is, confinement. You are not alive. You are there and you are not alive, where you don’t know if it is day or night, you don’t really know the time, you are eating poorly, every day that you are there you are dying little by little. I cried every day during those 15 days,” he said at the time.
His testimony matches some of those described by the migrants Human Rights Watch spoke with, such as being isolated, having only a sheet and a pillow and receiving little food.
Faced with cases like these, Human Rights Watch urged the United States to halt the potential transfer of migrants to Guantanamo, a call that comes amid the Trump administration’s tightening of immigration policy and its plans to send people to third countries with which it has agreements, such as Costa Rica, Panama, Paraguay and Uganda.
Human Rights Watch’s Americas director said every migrant in detention must be treated with basic humanity. “This isn’t a privilege. It’s a fundamental right,” Goebertus said.
The Trump Administration Wants to Build More Roads Through National Forests
The Gifford Fire, the largest fire to burn in California so far this year, started near a road. Research shows wildfires are more likely to start within 50 feet of a road than they are farther out. (photo: Benjamin Hanson/Getty)
On Friday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is expected to formally start the process of undoing the 2001 Roadless Rule — a move that it argues will help the country's firefighters.
"For nearly 25 years, the Roadless Rule has frustrated land managers and served as a barrier to action — prohibiting road construction, which has limited wildfire suppression and active forest management," U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz said in a press statement Wednesday.
Forest ecologists and fire scientists say it's not that simple, and they warn that more roads could lead to more wildfires.
"The law of unintended consequences is a very real law," said Alexandra Syphard, senior research scientist with the Conservation Biology Institute and the director of science for the Global Wildfire Collective, which aims to connect fire scientists with wildfire managers.
Syphard, a research ecologist who has been studying wildfire for almost 30 years, said that historically, when it comes to roads and wildfires, a clear pattern has held.
"One of the most fundamental concepts in fire, especially in terms of fire geography, is that roads are the dominant place where you see ignitions," Syphard said.
The reason is twofold. Where there are roads, there are people. And where there are people, there tend to be wildfires. Additionally, plowing roads into roadless forests and cutting through forest canopies can change the types of vegetation that grow on the forest floor.
A study by the Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Research Station, published in 2020, found that non-native plants are twice as common within 500 feet of a road as they are farther away. The study, which aimed to address the broader assertion that roads are needed to prevent fires, concluded: "Speculation that eliminating road prohibitions would improve forest health is not supported by nearly twenty years of monitoring."
The USDA, which includes the Forest Service, did not respond to a request for comment.
Managing forests to reduce wildfire
The Roadless Rule has been a source of conflict and litigation between states, industry and environmental groups since its creation in 2001.
During his first term, President Trump stripped roadless protections for Alaska's Tongass National Forest — the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world — only for them to be restored by the Biden administration in 2023.
Environmental organizations argue that the Trump administration's most recent efforts to rescind roadless protections are driven more by a desire to increase timber production in national forests than by a need to reduce wildfire risk. President Trump signed an executive order in March calling for a 25% increase in the nation's timber production.
Outside of Alaska, rescinding roadless protections won't open up a bunch of stands of harvestable timber, said former Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth, who served under President George W. Bush right after the Roadless Rule was first implemented.
"The areas that were left roadless, were left roadless for a reason," he said. "Because they didn't have the timber in there and because it was expensive to do road construction."
Bosworth said if the Trump administration wants to reduce wildfire risk in roadless areas, there's an opportunity to do it under the existing rule. While the Roadless Rule prohibits large-scale logging, it does have an exception for smaller-diameter timber to be cut and sold if it improves habitat for threatened or endangered species, or it reduces the risk of "uncharacteristic wildfire" — that is, more severe wildfires than the area would normally have.
"In my view, our timber program should be focused on [improving forest health] anyway, whether you're going into a roadless area or whether you're doing that in other areas," he said. "If we really focused on that, we'd be probably providing more timber on accident than we do on purpose."
A notice of intent to roll back the Roadless Rule, published Thursday by the Trump administration, noted that while exceptions to the rule are sometimes made, "the use of exceptions has been limited, and the majority have been for forest stewardship purposes."
"Surgical" use of roads may be helpful
There are situations where roads are beneficial to wildfire suppression efforts.
A 2021 study by researchers in Oregon found that while roadless areas in Western forests had fewer ignitions than places with roads, the fires that did start tended to burn more land.
"Fires that start near roads tend to be controlled more quickly and smaller for obvious reasons of rapid detection and access [for firefighters]," said Matt Thompson, a former research forester at the Forest Service and the vice president of wildfire risk analytics at Vibrant Planet, who was not involved in the 2021 study.
Being able to quickly detect and suppress fires near homes or other valuable resources is a good thing, he said, but when fires are burning in roadless areas they're often far away from both.
Roads can also be a fuel-break for firefighters — a vegetation-less barrier that they can use to try to stop or slow a fire's growth.
In its initial announcement that it would be rescinding the Roadless Rule, the Trump administration said it had identified 28 million acres of roadless areas that are at high or very high risk of wildfire. Thompson said he's curious where those acres are — and the USDA didn't respond to NPR's questions about that finding.
But he said if the administration took "a surgical approach" to building roads in areas where they could be used as fire breaks to protect communities or homes, and provide for firefighter safety, it could be beneficial.
"The question is, will we have the resources and can we get that done in time so it's not just a new risk sitting out there?" Thompson said.
The public comment period on the proposed rescission ends Sept. 19.
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